If a piece of metal rusts before we can protect it or recycle it, do we lose it forever?
Would a piece of metal just rust away to nothing if just left outside?
What is the chemical change from [insert metal] to rust?
In: Chemistry
No, we don’t.
Fundamentally, rust is just the metal binding to oxygen from the air. To get rid of that oxygen, there are several processes we can use, the most common being simply smelting the stuff down.
Fun fact: Most metal “ores” are basically the rusted version of said metal plus some rock. So whatever you get after a metal rusts, it is still “purer” than what you get when you dig it out of the ground.
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